11/14/14 – Trevor Timm – The Scott Horton Show

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Yeah, Trevor Tim, he writes for the Guardian.
He used to be with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
He is executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
And that's Greenwald and Ellsberg and Snowden and others are on the board of directors of that thing.
And he writes, did I mention, for the Guardian.
Follow him on Twitter at TrevorTim2Ms there.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Trevor?
Hey, great.
Thanks for having me back.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
You've been writing some really good stuff lately, man.
We've been running it all at AntiWar.com pretty much, I think.
I want to start off, though, with something you didn't write, but I know you know all about.
At least you do now.
And that is this huge new story from the Wall Street Journal.
Americans' cell phones targeted in secret U.S. spy program.
And before I let you go, I want to mention to the audience.
If you ever need to get around the Wall Street Journal paywall, just put the title in Google News and they'll let you read the whole article there.
It's American cell phones targeted in secret U.S. spy programs.
So what's the scoop?
Please let us in on it.
Sure.
So this is actually an amazing story.
And one I hope gets a lot of attention in the days going forth.
Basically, what is happening is the federal government is using a tool that we have all known has existed, which is commonly called a Stingray, which is essentially a fake cell phone tower that can force your phone and every phone around it to connect to, essentially cutting out of the equation the phone carrier providers.
And then they can suck up all sorts of data from your phone from this fake cell phone tower.
So your location, for example, or potentially who you're calling and who's calling you and for how long.
And in some cases, even the content of calls, it's unclear if they're doing content here.
But what is what makes this so crazy is that the U.S. marshals are literally flying planes around what the Wall Street Journal says is a range covering most of the U.S. population.
And just having these souped up stingrays, which are called dirt boxes, they're flying them around these populated areas and sucking up all sorts of cell phone data in an apparent attempt to find suspects.
But what's happening is that tens of thousands of innocent people, their cell phone location information is being sucked up along the way.
So essentially, the government is running a secret mass spying program from the air without any sort of accountability or transparency whatsoever.
This was never voted on by anybody, and it is violating people's privacy left and right.
And we had no idea.
Yeah.
And so now I guess the confusion must be all mine here about the marshal service.
I guess I thought they served the judiciary.
Maybe they were under the Justice Department, technically speaking or something, but they're supposed to be sort of the arm of another branch of government.
And I wonder if that's part of a technicality that they're using to be able to get away with this or something.
Yeah, you know, I think that's a really interesting part of the story that wasn't fully explored.
Like, why are the U.S. marshals doing this?
You know, I think part of the government's explanation or excuse for this is, well, we've been getting court orders for this.
We've seen in the past two years that the government has actually been misleading judges about the nature of their surveillance.
So, for example, when they use these stingray devices, they don't accurately describe them in the court order.
So the judge doesn't actually know what they're approving.
They think that they're approving some sort of standard surveillance technique, where instead they're approving this mass surveillance technique, which sucks up, you know, everybody's cell phone information.
And actually, a few judges have actually kind of fought back against the government about this and gotten really angry that they've been misleading the courts.
And so it could be happening in this situation, too, where the courts think that they're approving something when they're actually approving something else entirely.
So, you know, I hope there's there's a lot more reporting on this in the days and weeks to come and we can we can figure out exactly why the U.S. marshals are doing this.
And by the way, it's not just U.S. marshals.
This was the focus of the piece.
But we know from different records in the past day that, you know, the DEA has this type of technology, the FBI, and likely more agencies than we can even name.
It's funny.
It's I don't think I count as naive, really, Trevor.
But it just it seems like they're trying to fill in every gap in our, you know, the regular kind of America's Americans idea of what they would never do.
I mean, yeah, I guess technically speaking, you could track everybody by their cell phone, but it's not like we live in East Germany or they would really do that.
But oh, yeah, no, they keep all our location data, apparently for five years at least or whatever it is.
And yeah, I mean, OK, you could have a spy plane that goes around pretending it's a cell phone tower and in a row in intercepting every everybody's cell phone and downloading whatever data off of it and whatever, getting right around the the safety features because they've got the keys.
But I mean, come on, it's they're not going to do that.
I mean, really?
But you're telling me as the Wall Street Journal says here.
Oh, yeah.
No, they are all right.
They're covering virtually every bit of ground in America.
They are fishing on all of us with this technology.
It's madness.
This is like an episode of The Outer Limits or something.
It honestly is out of a TV show or movie that they're literally flying planes around the country, vacuuming up as much data as they can from from the American public.
I mean, I think if you didn't see this detailed report in The Wall Street Journal, you might not even believe it.
You might think it's something out of the movie Enemy of the State or something.
But, you know, we know we've known that this technology has been available to local police for a long time, at least the the technology being used on the ground, where they can point these devices at a neighborhood or a or apartment building or a house and kind of see what type of cell phones are in that within that area.
But to be flying around and just vacuuming it up willy nilly is is really shocking.
And I, you know, nobody in Congress has said anything.
And it's been less than 24 hours.
So, you know, I guess we should at least give them a day.
But there should be congressional investigations about this.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, I mean, the layers of secrecy here are virtually unlimited.
We don't really know yet, do we?
Do they talk very much in the article about just how much fishing is going on here, where, you know, they claim to the judge?
I think you're implying that.
Well, we're looking for, you know, Johnson.
And so this is how we're going to find him is by going out there and looking for his cell phone.
But meanwhile, they're they're scanning everybody else, too.
Are they also looking for whatever criminal behavior that they can possibly find out of whatever they're vacuuming up from people's phones?
Because, again, this in the NSA, these are federal cops with jurisdiction over American citizens.
Right.
You know, we've been hearing so much about the NSA in the past year and a half, but this is actually much more directly violating people's privacy.
And it's being done by domestic law enforcement.
You know, this isn't something that we're doing.
I mean, it's certainly something we're probably doing in other countries, but this is happening in the United States.
And, you know, it's it's really unclear to your first question about, you know, what's happening to all this innocent, all the innocent people who are getting vacuumed up in this surveillance program.
You know, what's happening to their location data is are is the the agencies that are using this kind of feeding this into an algorithmic system where they're looking for patterns of suspicious behavior, not just suspects that they already have named.
And they don't really have answers for that.
You know, we don't know exactly what this information where it's being stored, how long it's being stored and what they're doing with it.
And this is why it's it's partly it's so disturbing is because, you know, this is all being done in secret without us really having a way to check.
Was it Hayden or Alexander that called us all zombies?
Everybody with an Android or an iPhone.
We're all zombies.
I think it was Hayden, but it could have been Alexander.
Anyway, point being that we're all so stupid.
We just hand them everything about us all day long as we cry that they're violating our privacy.
Well, I mean, you know, it's it's hard to live in 2014 without having a smartphone.
You know, people need it for their daily lives.
And unfortunately, the government has been taking advantage of that without people actually knowing.
Right.
Well, and now we know.
And yet, as you say, it's a trade off.
I don't see how I always suspected all this from the Internet's invention on.
So I'm shocked, but never surprised.
All right, Trevor, Tim, we'll be right back.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Yesterday we had Marcy Wheeler on the Great Empty Wheel, and she talked about how the USA Freedom Act is just some fake reform that many ways is going to make matters worse and hardly fix anything.
But now that's not the only one.
Trevor at the Guardian dot com.
Trevor, Tim writes, Watch out.
The U.S. government wants to pass new spying laws behind your back.
They call it cyber security.
I say, look out.
So tell us all about this.
What's this new law and who's pushing it?
Well, this law has been being pushed for a couple of years now.
Actually, the House has already passed it a couple of times.
It's either been called CISPA or CISA, C-I-S-A.
Yeah, exactly.
Essentially, what it is, is what they call a quote unquote information sharing bill.
But what it does is carve out this giant loophole in privacy laws that allow companies to hand over large quantities of data to the government with a very nebulous and vague wording, which could allow them essentially hand over communications without any sort of warrant or court order whatsoever, all under the guise of cyber security.
And there are myriad privacy protections that have been proposed, but the bill's authors have rejected them.
And luckily, actually, the Obama administration has in the past threatened to veto it because of all of these people raising privacy concerns.
But Senator Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss have again said in the past week or two that they want to bring this up in the lame duck session.
And they could potentially pass it when nobody's paying attention.
And all of a sudden, it would become law because, you know, as long as the president signed it, who, you know, probably at this point doesn't want to have this huge veto fight over this bill, considering all of the cyber security news we've had lately.
So, you know, I think it's a real danger of happening.
Whether it does or not, I think still remains to be seen.
You know, they want to try to pass a lot of stuff in the lame duck session, which they may not get to.
But, you know, I thought it was important to bring attention to just so people know it may be coming.
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, just because it's been defeated twice doesn't mean they're going to stop trying to do it.
And really, it's along the same lines of what Marcy was saying yesterday about, oh, yeah, no, we'll just keep all the data at the private company or we'll just use the excuse that we're getting it from this third party.
And, you know, they had invented this doctrine that somehow if two people have business, then automatically anything that either of them know about each other is not protected by the Fourth Amendment anymore.
And the government can have access to all of it somehow.
I mean, it sounds like I'm overstating it, but am I really overstating the third party doctrine there?
Well, you know, I don't think so.
But I think the real question here is.
It sounds completely ridiculous.
That's why I'm double checking with you.
Because, oh, yeah, no, I signed a contract with AT&T that I get phone service from them.
Well, obviously, then I have no expectation of privacy whatsoever.
What any of those records say, really, why shouldn't I have an expectation of privacy if that's my contract with them?
I only don't have an expectation of privacy because I know that I live in a lawless totalitarian police state where the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply and the government does not respect the restrictions on its power or my rights.
That's why I have no expectation.
But isn't there some court doctrine that says I shouldn't if I shouldn't have to lack the expectation, but for the government's violation of my rights, then it doesn't count?
I think you're spot on.
You know, the government has taken this kind of absurd position that anything that is not the content of your conversations talking to a person in the United States when you're in the United States is fair game for them.
So that means any conversation you have overseas to somebody.
That means any conversation happening between two people overseas.
That means all of the metadata potentially related to your phone call, you know, who calls you, who you call, the time, length, location of your call.
All of this is potentially fair game for the government, you know, putting aside the CISPA or CISA law that we're talking about now.
And, you know, we see that being kind of manifested in all sorts of ways, including this crazy stingray dirt box story where they're, you know, flying around an airplane, sucking up all this location data all over the country.
And, you know, it's come to the point where their argument has reached absurd levels.
And yet, you know, Congress continues to ignore it.
And the government continues to try to obfuscate this in courtrooms so that people can't challenge it.
And, you know, as these media stories come out one after another, eventually something's going to have to change.
And there's going to have to be some at least accountability from one branch of the government so that the American people can at least challenge what's going on.
Right.
Yeah.
Did you ever see that great Onion satire piece where it's like their Sunday morning news show and they're talking about how the CIA's Facebook project is doing really great?
They've compiled information on everybody and they could have never done this without getting people to sign up and do it themselves.
But now they have access to everything about everyone.
Oh, totally.
I mean, you know, Facebook that the Onion was obviously satire, but it was so true.
I mean, in many ways, you know, social networks are the greatest gift that intelligence agencies can ask for.
All right.
Now, so talk to me about this torture report.
Are we ever going to be able to see even the relevant parts of the summary of this thing or what?
I mean, hopefully, you know, I think there's some some good news in that.
Well, first of all, there's terrible news that somehow it's you would you it would be hard to imagine that the Intelligence Committee in the Senate could get worse, given that Senator Feinstein has essentially kept everything secret for the past, you know, four or five or six years.
But the Republicans are going to take over the Senate and the incoming chairman, Richard Burr, has said that he's not going to hold any public hearings on intelligence agencies whatsoever unless somebody is getting confirmed.
So we're going to know even less about what the NSA and CIA are doing over the next couple of years.
But hopefully Feinstein, whose one positive attribute is that she has been pushing for the CIA torture report to be released.
So she has about two months to do it.
And the wild card here is Mark Udall.
Mark Udall, the senator, the one of two senators with Ron Wyden who have been fighting the hardest for this this torture report to be released, just got voted out of office, sadly.
But he has an amazing opportunity to read the torture report from the Senate floor, kind of like Senator Gravel, Mike Gravel, did in the 1970s with the Pentagon Papers.
You know, the Constitution has this speech and debate clause that gives senators immunity even when they're reading classified information that would be illegal for anybody else to release.
They can read it on the Senate floor and get it out to the public.
And, you know, hopefully the pressure is on Mark Udall to kind of become this transparency hero where, you know, he can get this information to the American public, which apparently we can't get any other way because the government just refuses to respond.
Well, you know, I did read one article where he's at least acknowledging your article and that idea and that he's at least considering it because, of course, he must be since he's heard it.
So that's something.
I don't know.
I mean, he could have all along, but I guess we'll see.
Totally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I wrote an article last week or right after the election saying that he has a unique opportunity to do this and people have been asking his office about it.
And the Denver Post just reported yesterday that he is definitely considering it.
He's leaving all options on the table and he knows that something's got to happen in the next couple of months for the American public to find out about this kind of stuff.
All right.
Well, keep up the great work.
I sure appreciate it.
Great.
Thanks for having me.
All right, Joe.
That's the great Trevor.
Tim, he's writing at the Guardian.
He's over at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
And look at this one.
The U.S. government wants to pass a new spying law behind your back.
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